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Green Party doubles caucus as former NDP MP Bruce Hyer joins

Bruce Hyer, elected as a NDP MP, announces he is joining the Green Party led by Elizabeth May.

Bruce Hyer left the NDP caucus while protesting party discipline over a vote to scrap the gun registry. Hyer was punished after he voted with the Conservatives. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

OTTAWA—The tiny Green Party caucus has just doubled in size, with the announcement that former NDP MP Bruce Hyer is teaming up to sit as a Green in the Commons, beside leader Elizabeth May.

Hyer made the announcement on Friday morning in his Thunder Bay-Superior North riding, accompanied by May.

“Yes, I am joining the Green Party,” Hyer says, in remarks prepared for the press conference at Finlandia restaurant in Thunder Bay.

“Our three largest parties are trapped in old style, 20th century politics, with little compromise or co-operation. The Greens are the party of the 21st century. They are the party of the future. They are putting principle ahead of political partisanship. They have the best platform and they have the best leader.”

Hyer, elected as a New Democrat, left the NDP caucus not long after Thomas Mulcair took over the reins in the spring of 2012, protesting party discipline over a vote to scrap the gun registry. Hyer was punished after he voted with the Conservatives. He was not given a critic’s job by Mulcair after he went offside.

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In his prepared remarks, Hyer pointedly hints that he would probably still be sitting with the NDP if Jack Layton was still alive and leading the party. “Jack was very persuasive, but he never whipped my voting. He was unusual in his ability to balance the desires of the party, and the needs of his MPs.”

In an interview with the Star, Hyer said he had been courted by all the other parties to join their ranks since he left the NDP. “I felt like the prettiest girl at the dance for quite a while.”

And he acknowledged that some of his constituents may not be happy about the move. “The only downside I can see is if some of my constituents disagree or are angry. If that happens, hopefully over the next two years I can prove to them that this actually works well,” Hyer told the Star.

In making his move to the Greens, democratic-reform issues were the clincher for this ecologist, forester and wilderness-tour business owner, who was first elected to Parliament in 2008. Hyer received strong assurances from May that he could continue to hold his own political views and not have to buckle to any Green Party line.

“Unlike other leaders, I want an unruly caucus,” May told the Star. “I want a large, unruly caucus.”

Beyond the Green Party label they now both bear, May and Hyer also share a strange coincidence in their biographies — both were born in Hartford, Conn., in the same hospital, though eight years apart.

Hyer, born in 1946, came to Canada in his late 20s, lured by his love of the wilderness. Early in his life in his new country, he even lived in a teepee in remote northern Ontario.

May, born in 1954, moved to Canada with her parents when she was 18 and still holds dual Canadian-American citizenship.

Though they weren’t friends in Hartford, they are pretty sure they attended some environmental events in the city together when they were young, when May was already organizing teach-ins at her high school and Hyer was a university student interested in ecology.

“We’ve known each other a long time,” said May, recalling that they also worked together, in their prepolitical days, when they were active in trying to halt insecticide spraying in Canadian forests against the spread of spruce budworm.

Hyer also spoke at the 2012 Green Party convention and when he left the NDP, he found himself sitting beside May in the far reaches of the Commons reserved for those independents who aren’t affiliated with the major parties.

Hyer gives his 18-year-old son, Michael, some credit for encouraging him in the Green direction. Michael Hyer is a student in environmentalism and politics in his first year at Carleton University, who has also been volunteering in May’s office.

“He’s my roommate in Ottawa and he’s been on me steadily — not that I wasn’t already thinking of it,” Hyer said. “But he thinks it’s the right party and the right thing to do . . . And I listen to my son. I’m no longer a parent. I’m a parental consultant.”

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